Running and Fighting, All to Save Her Son

Lena Headey stars in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, a new science fiction series that brings the Terminator story to television.Credit
Isabella Vosmikova/Fox

The writers’ strike brings with it, of course, the significant potential to lower our viewing standards now that television’s midseason is under way. How amenable will most people be to rendering honest judgments on anything new and being shown and not the 923rd season of a reality venture in which people trade wives, or nannies, or plastic surgeries, or wallpaper or ferrets?

I propose circumventing the problem with the creation of two temporary critical categories: strike-good and, well, just plain good. To the second denomination I submit “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles,” a new Fox series that begins on Sunday. One of the more humanizing adventures in science fiction to arrive in quite a while, the series is taut, haunting, relevant and an exploration of adolescent exceptionalism rendered without the cheerleading uniforms and parody of “Heroes.”

Extending the “Terminator” franchise, built on Arnold Schwarzenegger in his liquid corporeality, the series revolves around a young woman whose commitment to maternity makes the ordinary parental obsessions we’ve come to live with seem no more serious than a game of backgammon. Sarah, played by Lena Headey, all anxious muscle, isn’t fretting about nut allergies and tennis camp and early admission to Amherst (though boy, would her son, John, qualify as out-of-the-box enough to get in); she is striving to save him from the government-sponsored nut cases of the microchip brains and titanium bones who seek to annihilate him and thus his capacity to save humankind from their apocalyptic vision.

“Certainly for a parent, the death of a child is no less than a holocaust,” Sarah says in one of the show’s spare voice-overs. “In the case of my son, these words are literally true.”

“The Sarah Connor Chronicles” is a fantasy of technophobic paranoia, but it is also a metaphor for mad, crazy blood love, for motherhood not merely as an honorable career but also as salvation. Keeping John safe has required Sarah to learn four languages, work at 23 jobs, assume nine aliases and submit to years in a mental hospital. Sensing possible danger and telling John that they must move on from their seemingly pleasant life in Nebraska, Sarah, in the pilot episode, orders him out of bed and onto the road: “Half an hour, one bag, plus the gun. I’ll make pancakes.”

John, played by Thomas Dekker, complements Sarah’s intensity with a quiet anguish. He hopes for normalcy, friendships, a long-term address, but he doesn’t throw the sort of predictable temper tantrums in which he might scream that he just wants to be like everybody else and enter a motocross competition. He likes his mother’s boyfriend and is saddened because he and his mother have to skip town just as the matter of marriage has come up. That Sarah decides they must leave and assume new identities, right after she receives the proposal, leaves the question lingering of what it is she is actually afraid of.

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“The Sarah Connor Chronicles” finds its dimension in the way it refuses to shy away from the terrors of ordinary life. By time-traveling her way around what would have been an ugly past, Sarah realizes that an alternate life would have left her dying of cancer. Cells wreak havoc just as robotic maniacs do. The most unsettling moments of “The Sarah Connor Chronicles” occur when, seeking to avoid such an outcome, she visits an oncologist’s office.